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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be the author’s line of work. He had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which he is a little skeptical of, given that he has actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not his problem with the video.

His problem is the opposite — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, you really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

In this rant, he does not talk about human needs or technology. He talks about a neglected third factor that is human capabilities- what people can do, because if a tool isn’t designed to be used by a person, it can’t be a very good tool.